cousins?—­Certainly I prefer the last, and should, I think, prefer it (as an evil), even if it were not the born weakness of my own nature—­though I humbly confess (to you, who seem to think differently of these things) that never since I was a child have I upset all the chairs and tables and thrown the books about the room in a fury—­I am afraid I do not even ‘kick,’ like my cousin, now.  Those demonstrations were all done by the ’light of other days’—­not a very full light, I used to be accustomed to think:—­but you,—­you think otherwise, you take a fury to be the opposite of ‘indifference,’ as if there could be no such thing as self-control!  Now for my part, I do believe that the worst-tempered persons in the world are less so through sensibility than selfishness—­they spare nobody’s heart, on the ground of being themselves pricked by a straw.  Now see if it isn’t so.  What, after all, is a good temper but generosity in trifles—­and what, without it, is the happiness of life?  We have only to look round us.  I saw a woman, once, burst into tears, because her husband cut the bread and butter too thick.  I saw that with my own eyes.  Was it sensibility, I wonder!  They were at least real tears and ran down her cheeks.  ‘You always do it’! she said.

Why how you must sympathize with the heroes and heroines of the French romances (do you sympathize with them very much?) when at the slightest provocation they break up the tables and chairs, (a degree beyond the deeds of my childhood!—­I only used to upset them) break up the tables and chairs and chiffoniers, and dash the china to atoms.  The men do the furniture, and the women the porcelain:  and pray observe that they always set about this as a matter of course!  When they have broken everything in the room, they sink down quite (and very naturally) abattus.  I remember a particular case of a hero of Frederic Soulie’s, who, in the course of an ‘emotion,’ takes up a chair unconsciously, and breaks it into very small pieces, and then proceeds with his soliloquy.  Well!—­the clearest idea this excites in me, is of the low condition in Paris, of moral government and of upholstery.  Because—­just consider for yourself—­how you would succeed in breaking to pieces even a three-legged stool if it were properly put together—­as stools are in England—­just yourself, without a hammer and a screw!  You might work at it comme quatre, and find it hard to finish, I imagine.  And then as a demonstration, a child of six years old might demonstrate just so (in his sphere) and be whipped accordingly.

How I go on writing!—­and you, who do not write at all!—­two extremes, one set against the other.